


"Be Yourself" Sounds So Cliché, but Hey, Let's Do It Anyway

by Sarcastic_Cupcake



Category: Original Work
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Anthropophobia, Anxiety, Depression, Gen, Insomnia, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Panic Attacks, Personification
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-04
Updated: 2017-10-04
Packaged: 2019-01-09 04:04:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12268524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sarcastic_Cupcake/pseuds/Sarcastic_Cupcake
Summary: I live with twin demons on my shoulders; sometimes they are quiet and sometimes they are loud.





	"Be Yourself" Sounds So Cliché, but Hey, Let's Do It Anyway

**Author's Note:**

> Title borrowed from the song "Malfunction" by Steam Powered Giraffe; I couldn't stop listening to it practically the entire time I was writing this, and it's a great song.

I live with twin demons on my shoulders; sometimes they are quiet and sometimes they are loud. They play hide-and-seek with me, too, but they never hide far away, and before long, get bored and come back. And they taint my memories, hiding the good behind a wall of pain and shame.

One of them is quiet and clever. She whispers sneaky-silent, so soft I can barely hear her. Sometimes I don’t, sometimes she steals my thoughts instead and pretends to be me. _Nobody cares, you’re just in the way, you can’t do it_ she says, and I listen because nobody else is talking. _You are truly alone, doomed to fail, it’s only a matter of time_ and I listen because I can’t tell the difference between her words and mine. She knows how to make me vulnerable, and she knows how to make me hide it. She steals my voice, moves my mouth like a puppet so that I can no more plead for help than grow wings and fly away. _“I’m fine, just tired,”_ even though I am not fine and “just tired” makes it sound little, makes it sound like it’s not every fiber of my being that’s soultired, makes it sound like I can fix it by just sleeping. But sometimes she screams at me, loud enough for me to hear, loud enough to make me flinch. _Just GIVE UP, everything’s pointless, why are you even still trying?_ and I listen because she’s so loud that I can’t not. She likes whispering better, though. She doesn’t want me to know she’s speaking.

One of them is loud. He is the stutter in my speech, the primal panic that sends me spiraling to a dark and deserted place where I can rediscover how to breathe without crying convulsively, the frenzy that fixates me on what I have not done instead of leaving me to finish it in peace. **This is entirely too many people, and one of them could be getting sick at this very moment, and you’re RIGHT HERE. You’re not safe, you can never be safe around a group.** And I listen because he collapses my thoughts to a jumble of fear and insecurity, and I can’t not surrender to his hypnotic pull. **All of this is due too soon for you to get it done. You did this to yourself, you sealed your own grave because you’re too lazy to function normally like the entire rest of the world.** And I listen because it’s easier than trying to drown him out, to pretend he’ll go away if I ignore him for long enough.

I washed them off, once. I could physically feel my shoulders lift, aching from the burden they were forced to carry, and it hurt even more when they came back because I could see how it felt to be free of them. It was like the snap of re-fracturing a bone, the sick lurching instant before agony slams full force back through every nerve. And a kind of numb pain, after, made all the worse by its poignant familiarity.

There are people who don’t feel weight like I do, I know that. But I can’t imagine it. How would it feel to be able to wake up after a good night’s sleep and get up and face the day with a smile? How would it feel to have even a single memory of pure joy, unstained by loss or betrayal or retroactive embarrassment? How would it feel to experience and take for granted inclusion and simple social pleasures? How would it feel to be happy?

My demons have many names and I know all of them, but it makes no difference. They pay no attention to my pleas for a reprieve, and they only hide when I call for a mediator, for futile reassurance that they tell no truth. I will never not feel the press of their vicious frames, I will never unknow the empty nothingness that they have given me.

But I know others that see them too. I find them in the forced “ _I’m fine, don’t worry, just tired_ ”, I find them in the dark, deserted places, and seeing the burden they too are forced to carry gives me strength. And we talk, loud to scare away each others’ demons, and sometimes I know, fleetingly, what it is to be happy. It’s in the “Alskdkfkska RELATABLE,” shouted deafening to drown out the “ _truly alone”_ , it’s in the “in...hold...out” to draw attention away from the impossibly shallow breaths and the “ **not safe** ”, it’s in the shared music full of beauty and hope and reassurance and victory. We know how it feels to be broken. But we also know how it feels to not be broken. And that, I think, is the biggest achievement.

I live with twin demons on my shoulders; sometimes they are quiet and sometimes they are loud. They are my demons and I will never be truly free of them. But I can be quieter and cleverer and, sometimes, even louder than they are. And so I am proud. I have survived for this long, and my demons will not get the best of me. I will not let them win.


End file.
